Leading up to the election, Julian Assange used his whistleblowing website to publish a cascade of emails connected to the Democratic party and the Clinton campaign.
Photograph: Carl Court/Getty Images

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has offered guarded praise of Donald Trump, arguing the president-elect “is not a DC insider” and could mean an opportunity for positive as well as negative change in the US.

Assange described his feelings about the US election results in an interview as “mixed” before going on to sharply criticize Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and providing a more ambivalent assessment of Trump’s ascent to the White House.

“Donald Trump is not a DC insider, he is part of the wealthy ruling elite of the United States, and he is gathering around him a spectrum of other rich people and several idiosyncratic personalities.”

He added: “They do not by themselves form an existing structure, so it is a weak structure which is displacing and destabilising the pre-existing central power network within DC. It is a new patronage structure which will evolve rapidly, but at the moment its looseness means there are opportunities for change in the United States: change for the worse and change for the better.”

The releases were highly damaging to Clinton, and US intelligence officials now believe they were hacked by Russia and passed to WikiLeaks to boost Trump’s bid for the White House. Assange has repeatedly declined to be drawn on the source of the hacked emails he published.

Roger Stone, a longtime Republican operative and associate of Trump, said in August that he had been in communication with Assange over an “October surprise” to foil Clinton. WikiLeaks began publishing emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee and the email account of Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, in October.

Assange made the disclosures from the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he has been hold up for more than four years, claiming asylum to avoid extradition to Sweden, where prosecutors are investigating allegations of rape against him. Assange denies the accusations.

Some of the earliest and most high-profile WikiLeaks revelations, including those based on leaks by Chelsea Manning, occurred when Clinton was secretary of state.

“Hillary Clinton and the network around her imprisoned one of our alleged sources for 35 years, Chelsea Manning, tortured her according to the United Nations, in order to implicate me personally,” Assange claimed in the interview. He went on to accuse Clinton of being the “chief proponent and architect” of the military intervention in Libya, which he claimed had created instability throughout the region and the refugee crisis in Europe.

Appearing to suggest the disclosures in the run-up to the election were a form of payback, he added: “If someone and their network behave like that, then there are consequences. Internal and external opponents are generated. Now there is a separate question on what Donald Trump means.”

The la Repubblica interviewer noted that most of Wikileaks biggest revelations concerned what she described as “US human rights abuses”. Asked why human rights abuses in China and Russia had not produced similar leaks, and what could be done to “democratise information in those countries”, Assange said there was already a “vibrant” Russian media which included critics of the Kremlin.

He said: “In Russia, there are many vibrant publications, online blogs, and Kremlin critics such as [Alexey] Navalny are part of that spectrum. There are also newspapers like “Novaya Gazeta”, in which different parts of society in Moscow are permitted to critique each other and it is tolerated, generally, because it isn’t a big TV channel that might have a mass popular effect, its audience is educated people in Moscow. So my interpretation is that in Russia there are competitors to WikiLeaks.” In addition, he claimed “no WikiLeaks staff speak Russian, so for a strong culture which has its own language, you have to be seen as a local player.”

Dozens of journalists have been killed in Russia in the past two decades, and Freedom House considers the Russian press to be “not free” and notes: “The main national news agenda is firmly controlled by the Kremlin. The government sets editorial policy at state-owned television stations, which dominate the media landscape and generate propagandistic content.”

This article was amended on 29 December 2016 to remove a sentence in which it was asserted that Assange “has long had a close relationship with the Putin regime”. A sentence was also amended which paraphrased the interview, suggesting Assange said “there was no need for Wikileaks to undertake a whistleblowing role in Russia because of the open and competitive debate he claimed exists there”. It has been amended to more directly describe the question Assange was responding to when he spoke of Russia’s “many vibrant publications”.